


I'm clean out of air in my lungs

by StrikerEureka



Series: Precious metals [1]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Car Accidents, Demon Shane Madej, Demons, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Ghost Hunters, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Injuries, Paranormal, Pre-Relationship, Road Trips, Sharing a Bed, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 07:14:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14279739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrikerEureka/pseuds/StrikerEureka
Summary: Ryan and Shane have been moving around something that is coming to a head between them. After a car accident, on the way to an investigation, Ryan slowly starts to become suspicious that Shane might not be what he seems. He realizes, though, that he just might not care.Shane sits forward suddenly. “Hey, pull over up here.”Ryan follows the instruction without questioning it, which probably says something about either his willingness to listen to Shane or his sanity. Maybe both; they go hand in hand. He puts on his blinker, even though they haven’t seen another car in a couple of minutes, and pulls off onto the shoulder.“Are you gonna puke or something?” he asks, putting the car into park, as Shane takes off his seatbelt with one hand and tugs off his Ray Bans with the other.“You better hope not,” he murmurs as he leans over the center console and kisses Ryan solidly on the mouth.





	I'm clean out of air in my lungs

**Author's Note:**

> Please don't read this if this is about you or your friends.
> 
> This is all heavily inspired by Lorde's "Supercut" and "Sober". I was not paying nearly enough attention to her during the concert I went to, recently, because I was thinking about writing this story. If you're not down with "Melodrama", you definitely should be. For real, listen to "Supercut" and feel the Ryan/Shane vibes.
> 
> Special thanks to Noora, as always. 
> 
> Warnings for a scene involving a car accident with resulting minor injuries. I can't think of anything else that needs to be warned about but if you see something else, let me know.

It’s Iowa in November. The sun is just starting to crawl toward the horizon, even though it’s just past four in the afternoon. The temperature is frigid, hovering in the single digits and promising to dip lower with every second that slips by, edging closer to dusk. It’s absolutely awful.

“It’s Iowa. In November,” Shane says, turning his head to look at Ryan, who adjusts his death grip on the steering wheel.

“I know where and when we are.”

“Really?” Shane asks, reaching up to scratch at the stubble on his jaw. Ryan can hear the drag of his fingernails against the grain of it. “Because I don’t know if you realized it when you added it to this season’s itinerary.”

Ryan ignores him.

“Iowa,” Shane says, facing forward again. “Iowa. Iowa.”

“The fuck? Shut up,” Ryan says, half laughing as he does.

“Say it. It sounds dumber the more you say it. Iowa,” he says, dragging the vowels out and making an exaggerated movement with his mouth with each one.

Ryan smacks the back of his hand against Shane’s chest, fighting back a laugh. “Oh my god, fuck off.”

Shane grabs his hand and holds it against his chest, palm to palm and fingers curling around his thumb. Ryan flashes hotly under the collar of his jacket but he doesn’t try to pull away. Shane looks at him again and Ryan can see the smile at the corner of his mouth even as he keeps his eyes on the road and decidedly doesn’t turn to look at him.

“Seriously, though,” Shane says, squeezing his hand a few times before letting it go. “The Axe Murder House.” Just the name of it makes Ryan want to shudder. He swallows around the lump forming in the back of his throat.

“Yep.”

“So is this one aliens or ghosts?” A beat passes. “Or bears.”

Ryan lets out a huff of surprised laughter that releases some of the tension he hadn’t realized was building in his arms. “Definitely bears.”

“Bears with axes.”

“And needles full of heroin.”

Ryan tries not to laugh as hard as Shane does, listening to his wheezing exhale. “It’s a real fear.”

“Bears with axes and needles full of heroin?”

Shane nods, shifting in his seat. “At least we’d hear them coming.” He reaches down and clicks the release on his seatbelt. 

“Hey, whoa—“

“I’m hot,” Shane says, leaning forward in his seat as he tries to tug his jean jacket down his arms. He’s wearing a hoodie underneath that pulls at the fabric, turning his sleeves inside out as he struggles against it. 

“How the fuck are you hot? It’s literally five degrees out.” Ryan glances over at the seat heater on Shane’s side but the lights are off. He nudges the vent that he can reach shut anyway.

Shane is still struggling, caught in his jacket. “I’m always hot, baby,” he says belatedly with an exaggerated wink.

Ryan looks at him, shaking his head and fighting a half-assed battle against a grin as Shane beams at him, finally freeing one arm. His heart pounds just a little bit harder in his chest and he lets go of the wheel with one hand to scrub his suddenly damp palm against his thigh.

“Ryan, look out!” Shane shouts.

Ryan doesn’t know where the stag in the road comes from. He didn’t see it step onto the pavement, he didn’t see it come to a stop and stare at them as their rental car barreled toward it. He sucks in a startled breath and tries to brake, tries to swerve out of the way, but the tires spin against black ice and they collide with the stag.

It all happens so fast. It feels like hitting a tree or a brick wall. Ryan loses control as he watches Shane fly through the windshield. He hits his head against the steering wheel and the car slides off the road and rolls down into a drainage ditch.

Everything is so, so loud and awful, as the car flips; the crunch and grind of metal twisting out of shape, and breaking glass and then everything stops abruptly; it’s quiet.

It’s so quiet.

When Ryan blinks his eyes open again, his vision is blurry, and his head _throbs_ in time with his heartbeat. 

Everything is so still. 

The pressure in his head is so immense that he thinks that his brain really is melting; it feels like it’s about to come pouring out of his ears. 

He tries to move his arms but one of them aches, sharp and bright, and he sucks in a breath that doesn’t come easily. He bites down on a whimper even as a tear rolls out of his eye and down his forehead.

He’s upside-down. Buckled in and hanging in the seat still. And it’s _so_ quiet.

With great effort he turns his head to the side, making more tears prick at his burning eyes. He can’t see fuck-all because his glasses are gone, but he knows that Shane isn’t beside him. 

Because Shane was thrown from the car.

A pathetic noise bubbles up in the back of his throat and he can’t hold it in behind his teeth. He tries to reach for the release on his seatbelt with the arm that doesn’t feel broken, but his perception is off and he can’t reach it anymore than he can find it. 

He sucks in a desperate breath. He has to get to _Shane_.

Panic starts to build in his chest, fast and tight, making his entire body shake. His hand falls away uselessly, fingers dragging against the roof of the car, overturning chunks of glass. Ryan closes his eyes and tries to calm his breathing, focus on whether or not he can hear any passing cars.

The crew can’t be too far behind them. He and Shane had gone ahead to get some establishing shots of the house, alone, but the rest of the team will be along soon. Someone will. He tries to breathe, but every painful breath that he takes reminds him that Shane isn’t in the car with him. 

Shane is probably lying in the road right now.

Dead.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Ryan gasps, bringing both hands up to his seatbelt, gritting his teeth against the shooting pain that jolts through his right arm. He finds the button, but it’s jammed. He jabs at it over and over, clenching his eyes shut and just trying to fucking _breathe_.

It’s still so quiet. No traffic passing by, no wind blowing snow across the road. 

He smells gas.

The panic in his chest starts anew when he imagines the car catching on fire and him stuck hanging from his seatbelt while Shane lay dying on some deserted road in bum-fuck Iowa. 

He’s struck suddenly by a memory of watching an old black and white movie about Joan of Arc. He remembers someone telling her to breathe in the smoke before the fire reached her so that she died of smoke inhalation rather than burning to death.

Another tear rolls up out of his eye and into his hair. His head feels like it’s going to explode, even as his vision darkens. 

Suddenly there’s the sound of something sliding down the embankment, through the snow.

“Ryan!”

It’s pain or fear that forces his vision to tunnel, or some combination of the two. He sees everything in flashes like some sort of morbid slideshow.

There’s the sound of grinding metal, the car shaking violently, and an abrupt, frigid wind that blows against his exposed skin.

Warm hands at his neck, pressing against his pulse, and a rushed breath.

Pain, white-hot and searing, through his arm. He tries to cry out, but he doesn’t have the breath to spare for it. 

His shoe comes off as someone drags him from the car and his foot is immediately cold and wet. He can see the driver’s side door lying in the snow, detached now from the car, like it’s been torn off.

The smell of gasoline fades.

An abrupt burst of pain as someone—Shane, his mind tells him—hauls him in close.

“—okay, you’re okay,” he blinks his eyes open, trying to focus his blurry sight on Shane above him. A hand on his cheek. “I got you,” he breathes, “you’re okay.”

Ryan tries to talk but his mouth won’t open. Shane’s eyes look entirely black in the pale, late afternoon sun. Warmth floods him and it feels like it comes from everywhere that Shane is touching him. He groans at the sudden change in temperature, lifting his shaking left hand toward Shane’s face, only just feeling the scratch of his stubble under his fingernails before Shane’s overly-hot hand wraps around his.

There’s a muted whisper in his head that tells him that this doesn’t _look_ like Shane, but it’s easily drowned in the adrenaline crash he’s suddenly experiencing.

Shane’s breath is hot against his ear as he gathers Ryan up against him, gripping his wrists with both hands. His thumbs dig into Ryan’s pulse points until the pressure of his nails loses its bite.

Ryan can barely keep his eyes open; he’s so warm and the pain is fading. He jolts suddenly, afraid that he’s maybe going into shock. Maybe he’s dying. He sucks in a pained breath, panic surging through him and making him lightheaded all over again.

His head fucking _hurts_.

“Shh,” Shane quiets him, calmly. “I got you.”

And he sounds so sure of it that Ryan lets his eyes fall shut. Even though he’s positive that Shane is dead and he must be dying too. It’s not so bad, he thinks, maybe they’ll be ghosts together. And then Ryan can spend an eternity telling him that he was right and Shane was wrong. Ghosts are real because boom, they _are_ ghosts.

Shane snorts softly and Ryan thinks he might have said that out loud. But he doesn’t get to think on it any further because he succumbs to the darkness behind his eyes. 

 

\--

 

Consciousness comes back slowly and not all at once like every movie and TV show that has a hospital scene has ever lead him to believe. 

He hears the brush of fabric, feels it against his arm, the pressure of the IV needle in the crook of his elbow. Distant beeping, not coming from his room, but somewhere down the hallway. Voices that are muffled like the parents in a Charlie Brown cartoon; he can’t make out a single fucking word. He tries to open his eyes, but his lids feel so heavy. He tries to wiggle his fingers and someone’s warm hand closes around them.

Shane, his mind tells him.

But Shane is dead. His eyes prick hotly with tears, clumping his eyelashes together, but he falls asleep again before they can trickle out from beneath his eyelids. 

When he finally does blink awake, his vision is blurry and his eyes feel like someone has rubbed them with sandpaper. He makes a wordless groan and shifts against the bed. A hand wraps around his wrist and he blinks groggily at Shane, standing at his side, where Ryan doesn’t think anyone was before. But he’s pretty fucking out of it so he doesn’t think on it too much.

“Here,” Shane tells him, leaning over him to settle his glasses on his nose. They’re his backup pair, he can tell by the way they sit on his ears, but he’s glad to have them regardless. Because they’re real, and so is Shane.

“How the fu—“ the harsh dryness in his throat cuts him off and he starts to cough, making a hot line across his forehead throb relentlessly.

“Here,” Shane says again, lifting him carefully by the back of the neck, a cup of water in his other hand. He helps Ryan drink until it’s empty, and he doesn’t make a single crack about how shaky he is or how much water he spills on himself.

Shane settles him back against the pillow and drags an uncomfortable-looking chair closer before he sits. 

“You should be dead,” Ryan rasps at him.

Shane stares at him for just long enough to make a hot curl of doubt twist in his belly. The fear that he’s imagining this, or that it’s all a pain killer dream, is suddenly a terrifying possibility. Shane’s stupidly long, warm fingers curl around his cold ones. Ryan squeezes as hard as he can.

He closes his eyes and lets out a shaky breath. It’s real. It has to be real.

“Sorry to burst your bubble, but I won’t be haunting you just yet,” Shane tells him quietly, an uncomfortable seriousness about him.

“You went out the windshield.” Shane shakes his head minutely. “I saw you.”

“Ryan—“

“I _saw_ you. What happened to you?” 

Shane looks fine. There’s a heavy, dark bruise at his temple that spiders out around his right eye, but other than that, he doesn’t look like he was in a car accident that put Ryan in the hospital. He looks like he got into a bar fight, at best. Shane squeezes his fingers again, quelling the rush of panic that rises up in Ryan’s chest.

“You hit your head pretty hard,” Shane tells him, speaking over him when Ryan tries to interrupt him. “Your airbag didn’t deploy.” 

Ryan just stares at him, breathing a bit raggedly. He thinks back to the flashes that he can actually remember. The stag. The sound of impact. Rolling and then coming awake, hanging from his seatbelt. Knowing that Shane wasn’t in the car with him.

“You pulled me out of the car.”

Shane nods, brushing his thumb over Ryan’s knuckles. His gaze flicks down to their hands and he stares, watching Shane’s pale skin rub against his own. He hates that it feels so soothing, almost like being hypnotized. The fear in his chest starts to loosen its grip. Because Shane is right, he’s fine. They’re both alive and maybe Ryan really did hit his head hard enough to imagine seeing Shane go through the windshield.

Maybe the whole thing was a delusion. It doesn’t really matter, he supposes.

He tries to lift his right arm but a quick burst of pain has him drawing up short. Shane lets go of his hand to knit his fingers together between his knees as he hunches over to lean against his forearms. Ryan rubs at his eyes, under his glasses.

“I guess we’ll never know about those bears,” he says.

Shane exhales a tired laugh. “Guess not. We’ll get ‘em next time.”

Ryan looks at him, already feeling the heaviness in his eyelids as his breathing slows. He doesn’t want to fall asleep again, not when he’s still not entirely convinced that this is real and Shane is haunting his dreams.

“Dream haunter,” he mumbles, as his eyes fall shut.

He thinks he feels Shane’s fingers brushing his hair aside and then the soft ease of pain in his head. He thinks, but he can’t be sure.

 

\--

 

Ryan is too sore to fly, even after two days in the hospital; but he just wants to go home so damn badly and sleep in his own fucking bed that he doesn’t care. By some fucking miracle he isn’t exhibiting any symptoms of a concussion, even after beasting his head off of the steering wheel, and he’s cleared to fly. It barely takes any cajoling to get the crew to agree to leave the same day that he’s discharged.

Ryan’s hip is tender where the seatbelt tightened up on him and bruised the hell out of him. He sits gingerly in his seat while Shane stows their backpacks in the overhead bin, fiddling with the ends of his seatbelt. He doesn’t want to put it on.

Shane drops down beside him, exhaling a tired sounding breath, reaching up to rub the bridge of his nose, under his glasses. He’s uncharacteristically subdued, looking more exhausted than Ryan thinks he can ever remember seeing him. The bruising at his temple is so dark that it washes out the rest of his face, making him look paler than usual.

Ryan can’t help but stare at it. He has to quell the inappropriate urge to reach out and prod at it, to remind himself that this is all real. That Shane is really here beside him and he didn’t lose more in that crash than his relatively low car insurance rate. 

Shane turns to look at him. “Yes, darling?” he asks, eyebrows raised expectantly

Ryan shakes his head. “Nothing.”

“Just admiring the view?”

“Your ugly mug is blocking it.”

Shane makes a mocking sound, like he’s imitating Ryan’s weak insult.

“Jackass,” Ryan mutters under his breath. 

A few rows up, a flight attendant starts running through the safety procedures as the plane backs out from the gate. The jolt of movement startles Ryan upright and he impulsively grabs the armrest between himself and Shane. 

It’s immediately embarrassing. He lets go and settles his hands on his thighs. He knows that Shane is watching him but for once, he doesn’t say anything. Ryan clears his throat.

“You think everyone’s gonna be pissed there won’t be an Axe Murder House episode this season?” he asks, glancing back.

Shane shakes his head, mouth pulling down. “I think they’ll be happy you’re alive.”

“Aww,” Ryan grins. “Thanks, big guy.”

Shane shrugs, reaching up to scratch at his chin. Ryan’s eyes follow the movement and they catch at the cut bisecting the corner of Shane’s lower lip. It looks deep, the scab clotting it black, like maybe it needed a stich or two. Ryan can’t remember seeing it in the hospital, but there are holes poked into a lot of Ryan’s memories of the past couple of days. 

The doctor that he saw in the hospital assured him that was normal, after the combination of painkillers and hitting his head like he had. So he pulls up the hood of his hoodie and tries not to worry about that or anything else. 

 

\--

 

Ryan jolts awake when the plane touches down at LAX. He doesn’t remember falling asleep and the sudden jump to awareness has him disoriented and his heart racing in his throat. 

“Hey,” Shane says quietly from beside him. His eyes are barely open, like he’d been asleep and Ryan waking up had woken him. He tries to feel bad about that, for a second, but Shane has become something of a safety blanket for him after all of the haunted houses and demon-infested pits they’ve visited together. He’s selfishly, pathetically grateful that Shane is here with him now, even if he is starting to resemble the walking dead.

“Hey,” Ryan rasps back belatedly, trying to get the frantic beating of his heart under control.

Shane reaches over and squeezes his thigh, just above the knee, and then lets go, sitting upright and stretching his gangly arms above his head. His knuckles rap against the overhead call light buttons before he settles his hands on his own thighs.

Ryan stares at the hand closest to him and tries to remember if the cut on the back of his knuckles is new or not.

 

\--

 

It’s dusk when they step out of baggage claim. Ryan feels exhausted in ways he’s never experienced before, like his body is taking too long to catch up with him. Like he didn’t just spend two days sleeping the worst of it off in a hospital bed. He pulls the neck of his hoodie up and bites at the collar, watching as Shane steps down off the curb and waves at an approaching silver SUV.

He bundles Ryan into the Uber without a word and follows him in. Ryan isn’t actually sure where the crew is but he’s too tired to care. His leg bounces anxiously as they pull out into traffic. Being in a car again is only making him nervous but he’s weirdly grateful, again, that Shane is there with him. 

He props his elbow up against the window and presses the side of his hand against his teeth.

Something prods the back of his other hand and he looks down. Shane’s hand is lying on the seat between them, palm up and fingers curled in a little. The knot in Ryan’s belly loosens slightly when he settles his own hand against Shane’s and receives a squeeze to his fingers for the effort.

Ryan wants to ask about this _thing_ between them; building and shifting for so long that Ryan doesn’t even remember when it began, or when it started to change. He doesn’t know when any of it started to look or feel like holding hands in the back of an Uber or exhaustive bedside vigils. He doesn’t know when he started wanting more from Shane or when Shane started wanting more from him.

If that’s even what this is. 

_Fuck_ , he’s tired.

Ryan pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes. Shane goes on holding his hand. And when they arrive at Ryan’s apartment, Shane follows him out onto the sidewalk and hoists Ryan’s bag for him.

Ryan stands there, holding out his hand for his backpack, giving Shane what he hopes is an expectant look.

“Invalids don’t get to carry their own shit,” Shane tells him. “Move it.”

Ryan rolls his eyes and leads the way up the steps to his building. 

He wants to unpack and settle in, figure out which of his clothes need to be washed, and take a shower, but he collapses on his bed the second he’s through the door to his room. The groan he looses when he tugs his pillow under his head is loud and obnoxious but entirely heartfelt.

“That was erotic,” Shane deadpans from somewhere near the door. Ryan doesn’t open his eyes but he thinks he directs his middle finger in Shane’s direction pretty well, regardless.

“You staying?” he asks, mumbling it into the pillow.

“You want me to?”

Ryan thinks about telling him to go ahead and head home, but he’s been being pretty honest with himself ever since he woke up in the hospital. He wants Shane to stay. He doesn’t want to wake up from another nightmare about car accidents and stags, or Shane breaking out the windshield of a rental car with his head. He rubs the back of his nose with the cuff of his hoodie sleeve. 

“Not if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll stay,” Shane says quietly. “Keep away all the ghosties and whatnot.”

When the bed doesn’t shift and Shane remains hovering in the doorway, Ryan cracks the eye not buried in his pillow open to look at him. He reminds himself of that honesty thing and it’s easier to say what he’s thinking.

“You can sleep in here, if you want.”

Shane makes a non-committal noise and it twists bitterly in Ryan’s low belly. He closes his eye again and resettles his cheek against his pillow, breathing in the familiar smell of home.

After a few silent beats, Shane shuffles further into the room. Ryan wonders what he’s doing for a split second before Shane is tugging his shoes off and dropping them onto the floor, one after the other. His socks follow and Ryan wiggles his bare toes before turning onto his side and drawing his knees up as Shane sits on the side of his bed; he pushes the hood off of Ryan’s head and cards his fingers through his hair. 

Ryan closes his eyes at the touch.

“Now demons are going to get my feet in the middle of the night.”

Shane tisks at him. “I’m the only demon here.”

Something in Ryan’s hindbrain bristles at the words, but he ignores it as Shane continues to run his stupidly long fingers through his hair, soft and too fluffy from days of no product. 

“Don’t touch my fuckin’ feet, you weirdo.”

“Trust me, your little, baby feet don’t do it for me.”

Ryan huffs a half-hearted laugh. “Don’t let anything else get them, either.”

Shane’s response is quiet and oddly serious. “I won’t let anything get you.”

Ryan falls asleep before he can parse that, with Shane’s fingers still brushing through his hair. He doesn’t dream.

 

\--

 

It takes weeks before Ryan starts to feel comfortable driving again. His arm had been broken in two places, and the cast has to stay on for a month and a half. It’s uncomfortable to drive with, but paying for an Uber every day to and from work is expensive, and unnecessary when he owns his own car, so he sucks it up and gets back behind the wheel.

Shane lives closer to the BuzzFeed offices than he does and Ryan picks him up whenever he’s running late. Otherwise Shane walks to work and almost always beats him there. 

It’s a Wednesday morning when Ryan comes in to find Shane already at his desk, headphones on and video editing software open. There’s a manila folder on Ryan’s keyboard with the words “TOP SECRET” written in red, uppercase letters across it. Ryan is already grinning as he maneuvers his bag up over his shoulder while still holding his coffee in his otherwise useless hand.

Shane doesn’t look up from what he’s doing as Ryan drops down into his seat and scoots up to his computer. The bottom of the folder has the words “ghost bullshit” written in tiny letters in the same red sharpie. He flips it open and reads through the articles and information that Shane has compiled for him.

Shane has never been the one to put forth a potential investigation site. He has always just been along for the wise cracks and the ride. The fact that he’s put this together for Ryan warms something in his chest, makes his heart constrict and then beat a little too hard.

The cast hides the way his hand shakes as he flips through the pages compiled in the folder. It showcases a hotel near Las Vegas, from the gold rush era, that boasts claims that run the gamut from shadow people to disembodied voices to full-bodied apparitions. The familiar thrill of excitement at the thought of an investigation—of potential proof of ghosts—bubbles up inside of him. 

He doesn’t realize how much he’s needed this until Shane is sliding his headphones down around his neck and looking at him with a questioning lift of his eyebrow. The bruise at his temple has all but faded; only a faint yellow discoloration that will disappear entirely soon remains. 

“Are the Ghouligans ready to ride again?” Shane asks.

Ryan’s face hurts from smiling so hard. “Yeah. Definitely.”

Shane looks at him for a moment longer before he resituates his headphones over his ears and goes back to whatever it is he’s working on. Ryan knocks their knees together and Shane hooks Ryan’s foot with his.

 

\--

 

Somewhere around the halfway point between LA and Goldfield, Ryan’s arm goes numb. He looks over at Shane, with his ridiculous legs folded up in the passenger seat, his sunglasses on, fingers tapping out the beat of the song playing on the radio, not a care in the world.

“You wanna drive?” he asks. Shane shakes his head. He’s never really gotten a reasonable response when he’s asked Shane why he doesn’t like to drive besides, _it’s unnatural, Ryan_. “I might need a break.”

Shane looks over at him when he tries to shake the feeling back into his cast-encased arm. He reaches over with one hand and takes Ryan’s elbow in his grip, fingers pressing into the crook of it. 

“What are you doing?” Ryan asks slowly, wanting to look down at whatever the fuck Shane thinks he’s doing but also too goddamn terrified to take his eyes off the road for even a second. Ryan’s fingertips start to tingle with renewed sensation. “What is that?”

“Foreplay,” Shane says seriously.

Ryan tries and fails not to laugh. “No, really, what are you—how are you doing that?”

“Pressure points, Ryan.”

“What pressure points are in your elbow?”

“Can you feel your arm again?”

Ryan moves it around a little and huh. “Yeah, actually. What the hell? You and your weird… whatever. Magic fingers.”

“Foreplay.”

Ryan laughs again. Shane’s hand falls away and Ryan kind of misses it.

Shane slouches back into the seat again, knees bumping against the dashboard as he settles. Everything is starting to feel normal again. He’s sleeping through the night without nightmares of car accidents and Shane dying, or unseen entities with purely black eyes looking at him in the dark. And things with Shane are good, but undefined. Ryan keeps telling himself not to push it, because it might ruin _everything_ if he does. 

Even knowing that, the idea of letting this thing hang between them any longer, without at least acknowledging it, makes his entire body feel cold. He suddenly feels so anxious about it that he can’t bite down on the words before they come tumbling clumsily out of his mouth.

“Are you—can we talk about it?”

“About what?” Shane asks, looking out his window at the same dried up, desert landscape that they’ve been barreling through for the last couple of hours.

Ryan’s palms start to sweat. “You know.”

Shane says nothing and the previous contentment in his belly starts to morph into something heavier, less pleasant. 

“Shane.”

He sighs. “I like you.”

Ryan is caught off-guard by the bluntness of it, how easily Shane has tossed it into his lap. He fumbles for his next line. “Oh.”

Shane laughs, tapping his fingernails against the window. “Thanks, Ry. I _oh_ you too.”

“Fuck off,” Ryan says, laughing a little too loud, fingers tightening around the steering wheel. He risks a glance at Shane, who is still facing forward, looking out the windshield. “I didn’t expect you to just say it, like that.”

“Did you want me to lie?”

“No.”

“Then…” Shane shrugs again. “There you go. Truth bomb.”

“Fuck,” Ryan whispers.

The silence stretches between them while the wheels spin in Ryan’s head. He doesn’t know what he was expecting Shane to say. He didn’t plan this very well, didn’t run through enough scenarios in the shower, when he practiced this conversation, and play out all of his possible dialogue options. _Fuck, fuck, fuck._

Shane sits forward suddenly. “Hey, pull over up here.”

Ryan follows the instruction without questioning it, which probably says something about either his willingness to listen to Shane or his sanity. Maybe both; they go hand in hand. He puts on his blinker, even though they haven’t seen another car in a couple of minutes, and pulls off onto the shoulder.

“Are you gonna puke or something?” he asks, putting the car into park, as Shane takes off his seatbelt with one hand and tugs off his Ray Bans with the other. 

“You better hope not,” he murmurs as he leans over the center console and kisses Ryan solidly on the mouth.

Ryan’s brain short-circuits. All systems offline. Absolutely no neurons firing. No thought trains leaving the station. It takes entirely too long for him to realize that Shane is _kissing_ him, but thankfully, Shane doesn’t pull away while Ryan struggles to react. He closes his eyes when Shane’s big, dumb hand comes up to hold the side of his neck, his thumb braced along the line of Ryan’s jaw. The slow, warm drag of Shane’s bottom lip as it moves against his own makes his breath quicken. The feeling of stubble scratching the corner of his mouth as he parts his lips to the wet press of Shane’s tongue is like a punch to the gut. 

He kisses Shane back. It’s slow and wet and deep, and it’s the hottest fucking kiss Ryan has ever had in his life.

He has no idea how long it lasts before Shane presses another chaste kiss to his damp lips and pulls back, but fuck. _Fuck_ , the heat of arousal is already pooling in his stomach and between his legs.

Shane looks at him, elbow resting on the center console, looking at ease in a way that Ryan is not. He is definitely, firmly in the _bothered_ column, right now.

His voice squeaks when he tries to speak and Shane’s grin is pure evil; Ryan hurriedly clears his throat. “That was—that was good.”

“Just good?”

“Really good.”

Shane seems content with that, sliding his sunglasses back on and reaching for his seatbelt again. He waits for Ryan to compose himself, either not noticing or blessedly not saying a word as he reaches down to adjust himself. Ryan doesn’t say anything until he’s pulled back out onto the road, clearing his throat again, just to be safe.

“Can we keep doing that?”

“I suppose,” Shane says, sounding put upon. “Although I’m not gonna stop calling ghosts ‘motherfuckers’ for you, or anything.”

Ryan scoffs. “Oh, well, relationship _off_ , then.”

Shane makes an aborted move, like he was going to reach over and stick his finger in Ryan’s ear or something, like he would have before the accident. But he stops and, instead, his hand finds its way to Ryan’s thigh, where it rests, warm and comforting, and just a little bit too close to Ryan’s dick for comfort. 

“Can’t get rid of me that easy.”

“No?” Ryan asks, fighting a grin.

Shane shakes his head against the headrest. “Sealed it with a kiss. Deal’s a deal, baby.”

Ryan’s grin fades to a small, contented smile, even as Shane’s words itch uncomfortably in the back of his head. 

The heat of Shane’s palm on his thigh is enough of a distraction, though, that he sets the feeling aside before long. It’s nothing, he’s sure.

 

\--

 

Goldfield isn’t exactly a ghost town. No one lives in any of the historic buildings in the old boomtown, but they’re all pretty far from falling into disrepair.

“People own every single one of these buildings,” Ryan tells the camera that Shane is holding. “Every one of them is either under restoration or has plans for it.”

Shane turns from him and pans down the street. They’re approaching the hotel, walking down the middle of the road, shoes kicking up dust as they go.

“I feel like we should be wearing cowboy boots,” he says. “With spurs on the back.”

“Or better yet, maybe tonight we’ll find…” Shane turns the camera on him, “a cowboy ghost.”

“Isn’t this a mining town?” Shane asks.

“I’m sure there were cowboys here, too.”

“I don’t think mining towns and cowboys are synonymous.”

Ryan shoves Shane with his casted arm. He has to look away from the grin that Shane gives him, down at his own dust-covered shoes. An arm comes up to wrap around his shoulders and shakes him a bit. They’re both aware of the camera following the two of them and Ryan tries not to go tense under Shane’s touch.

“Miner ghosts, cowboy ghosts with little spurs on their boots, a rich, old, white man in a mask,” Shane proclaims, “all that and more, on tonight’s episode of _Scooby Doo_.”

Ryan laughs and shoves him off entirely. Shane holds the camera aside as they reach the front door of the old Goldfield Hotel. “You ready for this?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

“Got your holy water?”

Ryan lets out a pained groan. “No. But I’ve got you and your big-ass head to protect me tonight. What could possibly go wrong?”

Shane sucks in a breath through gritted teeth as he brings the camera up again. “Ohh, famous last words, buddy.”

“Fuck you.”

 

\--

 

The owner of the building had met them earlier, when it was still light out, and had taken them on a tour of the hotel. It’s four stories and only two of them are renovated. The third story is in the process of restoration, and the fourth is still a construction hazard. He shows them where they can and cannot go (for their own safety) and gives them a rundown on the history of the building, both haunted and otherwise.

Ryan has read up on the hotspots, and he knows that Shane has some basic knowledge of them as well, seeing as how he had gifted the case to Ryan. They set up and take some establishing shots before it gets too dark, their cameraman following them around for a while as they do some exploring.

They’re not allowed to stay overnight, after they conclude the investigation, but Ryan is already starting to feel the prickle of unease under his skin as the sun sinks entirely below the horizon. 

“So what’s going on in this room?” Shane asks, looking at the screen of his camera as he films Ryan.

Ryan retells the story, knowing that he’ll likely just end up doing a voiceover for this part in his Theory Voice later. He points out the radiator where the pregnant prostitute—a woman named Elizabeth—was chained by the baby’s supposed-father, George Wingfield. 

“She was pregnant?” Shane asks, glancing up at him.

“Yeah, he was a real piece of shit.” Ryan gestures off into the darkness. “Apparently he threw the baby into an old mineshaft, after it was born, too.”

“What a dick.”

“Yeah, for real.”

Ryan watches as Shane’s eyes trail off to the side, like he’s tracking movement. It sends a chill up Ryan’s spine, standing the hair on his arms on end as he hurriedly looks to his left. He sees nothing but darkness, almost afraid to swing his flashlight in that direction. But even when he does, he sees nothing.

“Dude, what—“

He cuts himself off abruptly as a sound like footsteps echoes overhead. They both look up; Ryan barely stops himself from reaching out to grab Shane’s arm.

“You heard that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What the fuck?”

Shane looks at him again, seemingly unconcerned. “We should do five minutes alone in here. Try to chat up the lovely Elizabeth.”

“Dude, did you not just hear someone walking above us?”

Shane shrugs a shoulder. “Old buildings make noise.”

“Not like fuckin’ boots tromping all over a wooden floor!”

“Well, it’s the fourth floor and we’re not allowed up there, so I guess we’ll never know.”

The inherent fear that Ryan feels is doing battle in his brain with his anger over Shane’s insistence on not accepting what is right in front of his goddamn face.

“Seriously?”

“Come on. Five minutes alone with ol’ Lizzie. I’ll go first.”

“Fine,” Ryan says, tossing his hands up and shaking his head. “You just fuckin’… sit in here and talk shit to a dead prostitute. Don’t come crying to me when a ghost rips your face off and eats it.”

The cameraman follows Ryan as they leave the room. He knows, logically, that Shane isn’t scared of fucking anything on the planet (except people who roam the streets with needles full of heroin looking for an unsuspecting victim in which to inject them) but he still doesn’t like to wander too far away when they do these solo sessions. Ryan paces around the hallway, never moving too far from their cameraman, who pulls his phone from his back pocket to check the time.

He leans against the wall and listens to Shane’s voice filter out into the hall. He’s not yelling or being obnoxious, or trying to act like a goading dick for the sake of making Ryan insane. It sounds like he’s actually trying to interact, asking questions and waiting on responses that don’t come. Or responses that Ryan hopes to hear later when he does the evidence review. 

Ryan checks the time on his watch and pushes himself off the wall to go hover near the doorway. The low murmur of Shane’s voice is odd in the stillness of the hotel. The whole place is creepy, but listening to Shane have a one-sided conversation, just out of sight, somehow makes it worse.

He leans in and listens but he can’t make out the words. Then Shane pauses and Ryan hears a feminine voice respond, and every inch of his body prickles with instant fear and disbelief. He practically scrambles around the corner, swinging his flashlight around, making Shane turn abruptly, lifting his arm to block the light.

“Jesus, Ryan, you could have just said time’s up.”

“Who were you talking to?” Ryan demands, feeling the cold rush of fear in his knees and the shaking of his hands as his eyes dart around the room. 

Shane gestures to the room at large. “Obviously the congregation of ghosts that you see before you now.”

“Fuck you, I _heard_ a woman’s voice come from here; are you telling me you didn’t hear that?” Ryan’s voice is approaching a yell; he feels half frantic with the need for Shane to just… agree with him or admit it or something. “How did you not hear that?”

Shane holds up his hands. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“You’re fucking with me. Was that you just trying to freak me out?”

“I swear it wasn’t me. Relax, okay? Your mind is playing tricks on you.”

It’s so convincing the way that he says it; it starts to settle something in Ryan almost instantly, and that only pisses him off more. 

“I heard something.”

“Okay,” Shane says. “Well, you wanna take your turn in here, now?”

“Hell no; are you kidding me?”

Shane’s hand wraps around his bicep as he steps close enough that Ryan can smell the remnants of his cologne, almost stronger now than it was on the car ride over here. He takes a breath and tries to calm himself down.

“It’s all right, Ry,” Shane tells him quietly.

Ryan closes his eyes and swallows down the nausea rising up in his throat. “My brain is melting.”

“Well knock it off. I like that brain.”

Ryan huffs a laugh and then gives himself a shake. “No, I can—I’ll do five minutes.” He pauses. “Three minutes.” Shane laughs. “Time me. And don’t fucking—just stay outside the door, all right?”

“Sure,” Shane says, backing toward the doorway, where their cameraman waits, filming the two of them. Shane uses his flashlight to salute Ryan and then disappears around the doorframe. Ryan watches the floor to make sure that the light from his flashlight doesn’t move off down the hall.

“Okay,” Ryan whispers to himself turning back to the room. The radiator along the wall sits there, looking innocent and harmless, like it didn’t play a role in a pregnant woman’s imprisonment and probable death. Ryan gives it a little kick, for good measure.

He’s brought the spirit box in with him but it just doesn’t feel like the right tool for this situation. Ryan focuses on his camera instead. 

“Elizabeth,” he says to the room at large. “Are you with me?” Silence; he counts to ten. “My name is Ryan. I’m from California and I wanted to… to talk to you. Are you here?” He feels a bit ridiculous asking questions to no one, but he presses on. “What happened to you was terrible. I’m sorry.”

A sudden breeze rustles his hair and Ryan spins on the spot, knowing there are no windows open in this room. The back of his neck prickles as the panic starts to settle into his bones again. He feels like he’s being watched, even though he sees nothing. He looks to the doorway again, watching Shane’s light and feeling suddenly comforted that he’s right there, waiting with his unending skepticism in case shit gets too overwhelming for Ryan. The thought settles him enough to continue.

“Elizabeth? I might not be able to hear you, right now, but I may be able to hear you later. If there’s anything you want to say, I’ll listen.”

The sensation of being watched creeps up on him again, making his entire body feel cold. “Fuck,” he whispers to himself. “Shane?”

“Twenty seconds,” calls a voice from the hallway.

“Okay, Elizabeth—or anyone else who may be in here—I’m about to leave, so if you want to tell me anything, now is the time.”

Ryan waits and waits but he hears nothing over his own pulse. He’s almost disappointed when Shane appears in the doorway again to tell him that his time is up.

 

\--

 

He feels a little bereft when they trudge out of the hotel in the watery dawn light. They shake hands with the building’s owner and thank him again for allowing them to plod around his property all night. 

Ryan drives them back to their hotel, even though his eyes are burning with the lack of sleep. Something unpleasant is still sitting heavily in his stomach, something that had planted itself before the investigation, but dug its roots in when he heard that voice respond to Shane.

Shane takes the first shower when they get back to their room, stripping off his dirty flannel and dropping it on the floor as he goes. Ryan fiddles with his phone, feeling antsy in a way that is both common and not at all. He sits on the edge of one of the beds and rubs at the back of his neck, trying to release the building tension there, until Shane comes out in sweats and a t-shirt. His hair is wet and his glasses are fogged up from the heat of the bathroom, and he looks stupidly soft and adorable.

Ryan sets his phone on the nightstand and toes out of his shoes. Their shoulders brush as they pass and Ryan fights back a shiver.

The room is lit only by the light of Shane’s cell in his hands as he taps away at the screen; probably liking an over-abundance of responses to one of his tweets or something. Ryan tosses his clothes into his open suitcase, hesitating suddenly as he stands between the two beds.

“Come here,” Shane says, voice low and raspy. He lifts the blankets and Ryan doesn’t let himself overthink it, just climbs in and lies down on his back. Shane locks his phone and leans over Ryan to set it on the nightstand before he settles on his side, facing Ryan.

The seconds tick by as Shane’s breathing begins to even out, coming slower and deeper already. Ryan has never felt less relaxed in his life. He feels rigid and uncomfortable. They aren’t touching anywhere, but Shane runs hot like the fucking furnace, and Ryan feels sweat begin to prickle along his hairline. 

“I can hear you thinking,” Shane mumbles tiredly.

“Sorry. I’m not… trying to make this weird, or anything,” Ryan says, glancing over at him, barely able to see him in the small amount of light that manages to sneak in around the curtains.

“It’s not weird, Ry. Go to sleep.”

“Right,” Ryan breathes on an exhale.

Shane groans a little. “You don’t have to sleep here, if you don’t want—“

“I want to,” Ryan says, quickly. “Definitely want to. Just… fuck.”

Shane heaves a breath and pushes himself up onto his elbow. “Turn over. Back to me.”

Ryan stares at him in the darkness. “Are you about to little spoon me?”

“I think it’s just called ‘spooning’ but if that’s what it takes to make you shut the fuck up so I can sleep, then yes, I’m about to little spoon you.”

Their faces are close enough together that Ryan can feel Shane’s breath on his cheek. It’s so strangely intimate and oddly familiar at the same time that it shorts out something in Ryan’s brain and he realizes that it’s easier to just roll over and let Shane fucking cuddle him than to think too hard about it.

So he rolls onto his side and Shane pulls him in against his overly hot chest and settles down again, breathing right into Ryan’s damp hair.

And for once, after an investigation, Ryan is able to close his eyes and not worry about any ghosts or bumps in the night that might have followed him home. Shane makes him feel brave, and apparently this is no exception to the rule. He loops his casted arm around Shane’s and closes his eyes.

He knows that he doesn’t imagine the kiss that Shane presses against the top of his head. And when he drifts off, his sleep is again dreamless.

 

\--

 

On the way home from Nevada, they stop for breakfast at a quaint, little diner that looks like a set from a movie based in the 1950s. 

“This is definitely some pod-people type shit,” Ryan says after they settle into the cracked plastic booths.

Shane plucks two menus from the holder along the wall and hands him one before flipping his own open to the breakfast page and staring down at it. 

“So long as these pod-people can make me bacon and hashbrowns, I don’t care.”

The laminated menu is sticky and Ryan rubs his fingers against the thigh of his jeans as he glances tiredly over the faded pictures of short stacks and omelettes. Ryan doesn’t really care what they order. It’s early afternoon and they’ve only slept a couple of hours after prowling around a haunted hotel all night. He just wants to slam some coffee and get back on the road. But Shane wanted breakfast, so here they are, listening to the soundtrack to fuckin’ _Blue Hawaii_ or something through static-crackling speakers. 

When the waitress comes to take their order, Ryan just asks for black coffee and Texas toast before he slumps over and rests his cheek on his bicep. He has to bite the inside of his lip to successfully smother a smile when Shane’s stupidly long fingers lace through his. Ryan props his chin up on the back of his other hand and looks up through his limp hair at Shane.

He wobbles their hands back and forth while Shane yawns and sets his chin in his own hand, elbow set against the worn tabletop. He looks ridiculously soft with his clear-frame, hipster glasses and his hair sticking out at odd angles from sleeping on it wet. Ryan wants to kiss him but he doesn’t know if a diner filled with a bunch of old, white people in the middle of Nevada is really the place to do it.

“You think we caught anything?” he asks, instead.

Shane’s eyes go big and he puts on a voice like an old mining prospector. “I bet we caught us a ghost, last night.”

“Shut up. No one even talks like that, out here.”

“I bet the ghosts do.”

Ryan kicks him half-heartedly in the shin. 

The waitress returns with their drinks and sets them down. “You mind giving me your salt and pepper so I can fill them up?” she asks.

They both grab for the salt at the same time and end up popping the top right off and spilling half the shaker out onto the table. Shane jerks his hand away and brings the side of it to his mouth, where he sucks on it like Ryan would do to a burn. His brow furrows and the waitress sighs. 

“Fuckin’ kids,” she mutters under her breath. “I’m sorry about that; stupid teenagers like to twists the tops so they fall off. I’ll get a rag to wipe it up.”

Shane nods his head at her and does a literal double take at Ryan.

“What?” he asks, pulling his reddened hand away with a wet pop.

“What was that?” Ryan asks.

Shane looks down at his hand before dropping it to his lap. “Paper cuts and salt don’t mix, Ry.”

The waitress comes back to clean up the mess and bring them a newly filled saltshaker before heading off again. Ryan heaves a sigh and rubs at his eyes again. The air is dry as fuck and it’s absolutely killing him. 

Shane bats his hands away. “You’re just gonna make it worse,” he admonishes. “I have eye drops in the car.”

“Sometimes it really pays off to have a friend whose eyesight is possibly worse than your own,” Ryan says with a grin.

Shane narrows his gaze and Ryan lifts a defiant chin at him.

Their non-verbal pissing contest is abruptly cut short, however, when the waitress returns with their food. Shane eats like a man on his last meal, somehow always managing to put away more food than seems physically possible for his skinny frame. Ryan eats everything but the crust from his toast and watches Shane plow through his breakfast. 

Ryan tosses his bread crust into Shane’s egg yolk. “Piggy.”

“Being disappointed by the undead all night really works up my appetite,” Shane deadpans. “Also, only the weak don’t eat their crusts. Natural selection is coming for you,” he says, picking one up and pointing it at Ryan before taking a loud, crunching bite out of it.

Ryan aims another kick at his leg but just winds up with his foot trapped between Shane’s calves. He’s too tired to pretend that he wants to put up a fight, so he just doesn’t. 

Shane pays for their breakfast and then searches out a bottle of eye drops from his backpack that he tosses over the roof of the car to Ryan. “Moisten up,” he says, before ducking down to fold himself into the front seat.

“Don’t say ‘moist’.”

“Oh, sorry, lube up those eyes, baby.”

Ryan’s groan turns into a laugh. “That’s fuckin’ worse.” Shane grins at him as he puts his sunglasses back on. 

Ryan leaves his casted arm on the center console, after he pulls out onto the highway. It doesn’t take long before Shane’s fingers find his again.

 

\--

 

When Ryan wakes up the following Saturday, he goes straight from his Keurig to his couch, where his laptop sits, uploading the footage from Goldfield. He sips his coffee slowly, watching the transfer bar, thinking. 

He knows he should watch and annotate the entire thing before he goes back to watch specific parts, but he’s never been that patient. He’s always jumped around, watching the parts where he knows he heard something, or saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He and Shane are a far cry from professional paranormal investigators, though, so he figures his editing process doesn’t really matter much. Not if he comes up with evidence.

Just the thought of that feminine voice makes him shiver. He knows he heard something answer Shane when he was alone in the room with the radiator. He knows it. What he doesn’t know is why Shane won’t just admit to it. It’s unsettling in a way he doesn’t fully understand, and it causes the little niggling voice in the back of his head to prod at him just a tiny bit louder

When the upload finishes, Ryan sets his mug down and pulls on his headphones. It only takes a few moments of searching before he finds the footage that he’s looking for, from Shane’s GoPro. He turns the volume up and listens, steepling his fingers in front of his mouth.

At first, it’s just Shane being a dick as usual, throwing out taunts and dares into the darkness. The radiator pings, like it’s cooling down, even though it hasn’t been used in god knows how long. Shane barely glances in its direction. 

“Lizzie,” he calls. “I’m here, waiting. Come out and talk to me.” It’s not Shane’s usual caliber of offensive dialogue and it makes Ryan’s brow furrow as he listens. It goes on for a minute or two before Shane stops abruptly.

There’s a sound in the dark, like far off footsteps. Heel-toe. Heel-toe. Heel-toe. Not coming closer or getting louder, but just… there.

“Jesus fuck,” Ryan whispers when the noise stops, his heart starting to pound in his chest.

He can hear Shane breathing. “Elizabeth?” he asks, voice quiet. “I know you’re here.” Ryan’s skin crawls with goosebumps.

Shane pauses a beat and Ryan strains to hear anything over the shifting of Shane’s clothing and the general white noise of the volume being turned up so high. He’s probably going to end up shitting himself if something loud happens.

“My friend, Ryan, out there… he’d really like to hear from you.”

Another pause. Ryan holds himself rigid, listening and waiting, but he hears nothing.

“That’s not very ladylike.”

Ryan cocks his head. “What the fuck, Shane?” he whispers to himself, squinting at the screen, trying to see… anything Shane might have been directing this conversation toward. 

Shane hums a little. “You won’t say anything.” Shane says _something_ that is too quiet for him to pick up on, no matter how many times Ryan plays it back. 

“Fuckin’ dick. Probably did that on purpose to make me sit here and replay the same two fuckin’ seconds over and over like an asshole,” Ryan mutters to himself before he finally just lets Shane’s mumble go and allows the video to play on. He’ll have to ask Shane later if he remembers what he said.

Shane tisks, like he’s disappointed. “What will you warn him about?”

Ryan really does almost shit himself when he hears a distinctly female voice say, “About you.”

He’s glad that it’s broad daylight because he is about as terrified as he is elated when he rips his headphones off his head and drops them to the floor.

“Holy fucking _shit_.” 

He wants to call Shane. He wants to immediately throw this in his face and ask him to deny the evidence—the direct _answer_ to his creepy question.

Ryan goes for his own footage next, scrambling to find the exact moment when he heard the voice from the hallway and came tearing into the room. Ryan is literally sitting on the edge of the couch as he taps the play button and watches. The footage jerks forward suddenly, he hears himself, far away and tinny through his headphones, still sitting on the floor. He’s staring, rapt, watching as he clears the doorframe and swings his flashlight in Shane’s face—the footage jumps—then Ryan turns in the direction that Shane had been facing.

Ryan hits the spacebar to pause the video. He hesitates a moment before dragging the time on the video back a few seconds and watches again. 

“The fuck?” he whispers to himself, dragging it back again. His hands are shaking as he watches it frame by frame, watches as he enters the room. He watches as Shane turns to look at him, as his flashlight passes over Shane’s face. 

The frame that distorts comes between Shane looking his direction and when he blinks against Ryan’s flashlight beaming in his face. No matter how long Ryan stares at it, it doesn’t change. Shane’s eyes are entirely black.

“That doesn’t—fuckin—“ Ryan rubs at his face, feeling cold sweat prickling along his forehead, a sour twist of anxiety and fear in his belly. His hands won’t stop shaking and the longer he stares, the more it freaks him out. “What the fuck?” He looks at the next frame, distorted like static on a TV, and the one after that where Shane’s eyes appear normal. 

He watches it again without stopping, watches Shane blink those oily black eyes away. He thinks suddenly of the stag standing in the middle of the road in fucking nowhere Iowa and he doesn’t know why. He’s starting to panic.

“Fuck,” he whispers, closing out of the video. “Fuck, fuck, _fuck_. It’s just—it’s nothing. It’s not—it’s a glitch.” He rubs harder and harder at his eyes until they begin to water and he’s starting to feel nauseous. “A fuckin’ glitch.”

The exchange from the video comes back to him. 

Shane asking an empty room, _What will you warn him about?_

And the disembodied response, _About you_.

Ryan slams his laptop shut and practically flies off the couch. He has to get out of his apartment. He has to get far the fuck away from that video and whatever the fuck he’s just witnessed. He really does feel like his brain is about to come pouring out of his ears. 

Stuffing his feet into the closest pair of shoes, he grabs his phone off the charger, his wallet and keys from the dresser, and bolts from his apartment.

 

\--

 

Ryan doesn’t intend to ignore his phone for the remainder of the weekend, but that’s what happens. He doesn’t respond to texts or calls or look at his email until Monday morning, when his alarm goes off. He certainly hasn’t touched the footage again. His laptop still sits where he’d left it on the coffee table, in front of the couch. Headphones on the floor and notebook opened to a blank page, waiting to be hastily scribbled in as Ryan amassed evidence to shove in Shane’s face.

The laptop gets left behind when he heads into work that morning, bleary-eyed and combating a headache from a night spent tossing and turning.

Shane isn’t at work yet when Ryan pulls out his chair and drops down in front of his desktop. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do when Shane inevitably asks him about his findings. Ryan doesn’t know what he’s going to say to Shane about _any_ of it.

Most of Ryan’s Sunday had been spent on his phone, at the Starbucks nearest his building, googling things he never really thought he’d ever google. Or even really consider being a possibility.

He’d just felt like an ass, sitting with a coffee, long gone cold, typing and deleting various forms of the same questions.

_signs of demonic possession_

_how can you tell if someone is possessed?_

_how do you trap a demon?_

Ryan tosses his baseball hat onto his keyboard and pulls out his phone, tapping it against his palm. It’s fucking stupid. He would _know_ if something had happened to Shane. He’s known Shane for long enough that he would be able to tell if something was wrong with him. Or if something had taken control of him.

“Fuck,” he mutters before blowing out a breath that puffs his cheeks up. He sits forward and unlocks his phone, pulling up his browser again. Nothing that he’s found on any sort of credible sites has given him anything useful to work with.

Apparently demonic possession isn’t all spinning heads and speaking in tongues. The signs don’t even sound all that abnormal, actually. Everything seems to point at things that can be explained away by normal occurrences like depression and other mental illnesses; and Shane doesn’t really seem in any way _changed_ since they met.

But still… little things keep picking at his brain, coming back to him and reminding Ryan that what he’s been noticing in Shane isn’t quite right, either. 

Sure, the things that Ryan thinks he’s seen can probably be explained away. The black eyes in the camera footage could just be a malfunction, as the video seemed to glitch at that moment, anyway. And Shane’s macabre and chaotic sense of humor on previous investigations (particularly at places like the Viaduct Tavern and the Old Alton Bridge) could be just that.

The only thing that really keeps Ryan from putting this all to bed and moving on, just accepting Shane for the fucking weirdo that he is, is Iowa. 

Ryan remembers the accident. He remembers vividly the sight of Shane flying up into the windshield, hearing the glass shatter, and coming to in the car to realize that Shane was not with him. He knows that Shane pulled him out of the wreck without a drop of blood on him, and only later did he show any signs of injury. And even then, it was hardly more than a bruise and some scratches.

A hand landing on his shoulder has him sucking in a sharp breath and almost fumbling his phone right onto the floor. Shane laughs at him, sitting down with a raised eyebrow. 

“Too much caffeine today?”

Ryan has to swallow to wet his throat before he can even make a sound. “Just… jittery. Didn’t sleep much.”

“Find anything on the footage?” Shane asks, taking a sip of his iced coffee.

Ryan swallows again, although this time it feels like there’s a rock lodged at the back of his throat. “Not done analyzing it yet.”

“You want some help?” Shane turns toward his computer and wiggles the mouse to wake it up. He’s never really helped much in the evidence review before and it just feels suspicious that he’s volunteering now.

And Ryan really needs to pull his shit together. He’s about to decline the offer when some much braver, dumber impulse in his head makes him say, “Yeah. Sure.”

Shane looks mildly surprised at his acceptance. “Yeah? Tonight?”

Ryan nods. “Sure, yeah. I’ll order pizza or something and we can… do… that.”

“Okay,” Shane says, giving him an odd look.

Ryan turns back to his computer and tugs his hat down over his head. He’s already regretting his big fucking mouth, but he can’t bring himself to tell Shane to forget it. 

The sooner he can put this asinine idea out of his head, the sooner he can get on with his life. The sooner he can go back to kissing Shane and talking shit with him on location, and forget about this completely irrational fear.

He slides his phone back into his pocket, feeling confident in his sudden determination. He’ll find a way to test Shane tonight, and Shane will laugh at him for being such a scared little baby and they’ll move on. Case closed. Shit solved. Moving on. 

 

\--

 

Shane arrives with a box of Ryan’s favorite extra butter movie theater popcorn and a six-pack of some seasonal, hoppy, Midwestern beer in a reusable grocery bag, He steps over the threshold and ducks down to kiss Ryan, warm and lingering before he kicks off his shoes and heads for the kitchen.

Ryan’s stomach is churning as he locks the door and follows. Shane is bent over, sticking the beer in the refrigerator when Ryan comes into the kitchen. He leans against the counter, as nonchalant as he can, taking the bottle that Shane hands him.

“You’re being weird,” Shane tells him, pulling off his beanie and tossing it on the counter, ruffling his hair up with his free hand.

“I’m not being weird; you’re weird.”

Shane snorts and twists the cap off his beer. “Right. Look, if you’ve changed your mind about this…” he waves his hand between the two of them.

Heat floods Ryan’s face as quickly as panic floods his belly. “No. I definitely haven’t.”

And somehow that statement is still true. This is what’s fucking Ryan up more than anything. Even with the anxiety and trepidation over this whole situation, he still wants Shane. He wants his fears to be total bullshit so that they can keep doing this. He wants Unsolved, and Ruining History, and Shane, and he wants to be able to have all of these things together. He doesn’t want to fuck any of it up by being an irrational pissbaby. He just has to _do this_ one stupid thing to prove to himself that he’s done likely irreversible psychological damage to himself with all of the ghost hunting and that the problem is him and not Shane.

He wants this thing with Shane so badly that it aches soundly behind his ribs.

“All right,” Shane says, setting his beer down on the counter. 

“Popcorn and evidence?”

“Evidence and chill?”

Ryan doesn’t have to fake his wheezing laugh. The smile on Shane’s face seems so genuine and innocent that Ryan convinces himself entirely for a moment that he’s being dramatic. It’s going to be fine.

He steps out into the living room while Shane is focused on opening the popcorn to put in the microwave. It only takes a second to complete the line of salt he’d made at the entrance to the kitchen, where carpet meets linoleum. His hands are fucking shaking as he stows the salt canister behind the couch; he has to shove them in his pockets to hide the tremor.

There isn’t much to suggest that this will actually fucking work but Ryan promises himself that the second that Shane steps over the threshold and into the living room that he will put this idea out of his head forever. He also knows that bargaining is the fourth step in the grieving process for people who learn they’re going to die.

His heart is beating so hard he feels like Shane will be able to see it when he turns and starts walking toward the living room.

He swears that it stops cold in his chest when Shane draws up just short of the carpeting. Their eyes meet and Shane blinks at him, slowly. Once, twice, and on the third, he looks down at his feet. Ryan breaks out in a cold sweat, nausea churning his insides so hard that he thinks he’s just as likely to throw up as he is pass out.

A quiet exhale leaves Shane. 

Ryan watches him set his beer down on the counter and look up to meet his gaze. He says nothing.

“Shane,” Ryan half-whispers.

“Ryan.”

He is definitely going to throw up. “Please just—come here.”

It seems like an eternity passes before Shane says, “I can’t,” and a heartbeat for Ryan’s world to come to a grinding halt.

 

\--

Ryan doesn’t panic.

He’s not sure _how_ he doesn’t panic, considering the fact that he’s almost had a psychological breakdown watching a flashlight turn on by itself before. And that was nothing, absolutely fucking nothing, compared to _this._

Compared to Shane being possessed by an actual fucking demon.

Ryan backs away from the kitchen doorway until his back is to the opposing living room wall. It puts several feet of distance between himself and Shane, who has retreated to the far corner of the kitchen, leaning back into the counter with his face obscured by his hand. Ryan presses his fingertips against the drywall to guide himself down until he’s sitting, because his knees feel like they’ve been replaced with jell-o. Blood rushes past his ears so hard and so loud that, for a moment, it’s all that he can hear.

He focuses on his breathing for a long, painful moment before he can bring himself to speak. His voice wavers anyway.

“Is Shane still in there?”

“I am Shane,” the demon responds, voice tired-sounding and muffled by his palm.

Ryan’s teeth fucking chatter when he closes his mouth. He sits on his hands because they won’t stop shaking. “How long have you been in him?”

The demon wearing Shane’s skin turns to look at him, bracing his hands on either side of him, fingers curled under the formica countertop. “Since he was an infant.”

“I don’t believe you,” Ryan rasps, his eyes growing damp. “You’re lying; you’re a fuckin’ hell-spawn. When did you take him?”

“Christ,” the demon mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose, like Ryan is exhausting him or something. “The baby died in the hospital and I took the body. He was gone by the time I claimed it. A no-frills possession because there has never been another soul inside here with me.”

The bottom drops out of Ryan’s stomach and he feels like he could just as easily throw up as he could hold it back. He swallows the flood of saliva in his mouth, tipping his head back against the wall with a muted thump. 

“This can’t be happening.”

“Ryan.”

“This is a fucking nightmare.” He draws his knees up and presses his forehead to one, closing his eyes. The dampness in his eyes starts to leech out into the dark material of his jeans. “This isn’t real.”

There’s a frustrated noise from the kitchen and a sound like someone sat down with a huff. “I’m real, Ryan. Everything that’s happened since we met has been real because this is _me_. I _am_ Shane.”

Ryan sits up again, wiping hastily at his eyes with the heels of his hands. The demon looks pained as he watches, eyebrows drawn together and forehead wrinkled.

“No, it’s all been fucking _lies_ because I never knew what you were,” Ryan snaps. “I can’t believe anything you tell me. I can’t believe anything you’ve ever told me at any point since I met you!”

“I have never lied to you.”

“Except everything is a fucking lie because you’ve been a demon possessing a dead body the entire time I’ve known you!” 

Ryan regrets yelling because if absolutely anyone hears him saying the things that he’s saying, he’s going to be dragged off to the funny farm without hesitation.

“This body is _mine_ ,” the demon tells him heatedly, jabbing at his chest with his forefinger. “I had to take it through infancy, pissing and shitting itself, and through puberty, and fucking _high school_ , for fuck’s sake.”

“You expect me to believe that you have the power to bring a body back from the dead to live inside of it but you don’t have the power to circumvent acne and awkward boners?” 

“No, the awkward boners were a treat for myself.”

The laugh that bursts out of Ryan feels horrible the second it leaves him; he claps a hand over his mouth.

The demon seems encouraged, by the sound, though. He pulls himself to his feet only to pace forward a few steps and lower himself to his knees at the salt line.

“Ryan, please. You’ve known me all this time and I’ve never hurt you. I’ve never _let_ anything hurt you.” That sets off an alarming noise in his head but he has to tramp it down; he can only deal with one earth-shattering revelation at a time. “You _know_ me.”

“Stop saying that!” 

“It’s fucking true!” The demon shouts back. “Stop being so fucking scared for two seconds and think about it!”

Ryan shoves himself to his feet, even though he isn’t sure that his legs will hold him until he’s already upright. The demon stays on his knees.

“Maybe you don’t consider it lying to keep the fact that you’re the thing I’m more afraid of than literally anything in the world a secret from me but I fucking do.” Ryan has to wipe at his running nose with the back of his hand as… as Shane looks up at him. 

Jesus christ, this is Shane.

His coworker, the guy he sits beside every single day at work, his friend, his investigative partner, the guy who keeps him from losing his shit in every haunted location they’ve ever been in, who makes him laugh so hard he could piss himself. The guy he’s slept beside and kissed and fucking cuddled with. The guy he wants fucking _more_ with.

Wanted more with. Fuck, he doesn’t know.

It’s Shane. And Shane is a demon. Has always been a demon.

Ryan feels so sick to his stomach, so quickly, that he nearly doesn’t make it to the bathroom in time. His knees hurt from how hard he hits the ground, and he’s throwing up before he’s even braced himself over the toilet. His stomach lurches until it aches and he’s left with nothing but painful dry heaves and damp eyes. 

He doesn’t know how long he stays kneeling on the floor, shaking and sweating so much that his shirt sticks to his back, but he doesn’t feel any better when he hauls himself to unsteady feet. Propping himself up against the sink is easier than looking himself in the mirror. He flips on the light, flushes the toilet, and rinses out his mouth without making eye contact with his reflection. He’s pretty sure he could live the rest of his life without knowing what he looks like in this moment.

When he’s done cleaning himself up and splashing his face with cold water, he stumbles out into the hallway. There’s no sign of movement in the kitchen but he hears Shane’s voice call out to him.

“Ryan.”

The final piece of his self-preservation must have fled in fear because Ryan follows the call of Shane’s voice without consideration. He hears the refrigerator door open and shut and then Shane appears again, and tosses him a water bottle. Ryan fumbles it to the floor, but Shane doesn’t mock him like he would have before. Instead he just stands there, looking tired and concerned as Ryan uses the bottom of his shirt to twist the top off. 

His hands shake so hard, when he takes a drink, that he’s surprised he doesn’t drop it again.

“I don’t know what to do,” Ryan tells him, his voice low and hoarse. He clears his throat but it just makes it hurt worse.

Shane seems to consider him for a moment. His shoulders lift in a half-hearted shrug, his hands held out for a moment. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Neither do I.”

The noise that Shane makes is frustrated; he rakes his fingers through his hair, setting it on end in several places. “If I had ever wanted to hurt you, don’t you think I would have done it by now?” 

Ryan drops his gaze; he can’t see that look on Shane’s face. He’s never seen anything resembling the pleading that he does now, or heard that sort of desperation in his voice.

“That’s not really comforting,” Ryan tells the floor.

“It should be! We’ve been alone in all of your little nightmare places, with everything that you think goes bump in the night, and I’ve never hurt you. Or let you get hurt.”

The renewed twisting in his stomach is entirely unwelcome. Ryan thinks he might puke again. 

“Stop,” he practically whispers.

“I would never hurt you, Ryan.”

“Shut up.”

“I love you.”

“Fuck,” Ryan rasps, covering his face with his free hand. “Fuck you. Stop talking. I don’t—you don’t even—how could you _possibly_ even feel that way?” Ryan drops his hand and meets Shane’s eyes again but he can’t hold his gaze for long. “This is a fucking—this is bullshit. I’m so fucking stupid.”

The silence drags on between them until it’s so far past uncomfortable that Ryan can’t stand it. But still, he lets it linger because he has no fucking idea what he’s supposed to say or do now. Suspicions are one thing but he doesn’t know if he actually really _believed_ that Shane wouldn’t be able to step over that line. And now that he’s stuck on the other side of it, Ryan’s brain has completely shorted out.

“If you want me to leave you, I will,” Shane says at great length, his voice flat. Ryan fixes his gaze somewhere around Shane’s shoulder. “I’ll go and I won’t come back to you or work or anything.” Ryan’s eyes sting with tears and he has to look away again. “But no one can know about this. You have to let me out of here.” 

Ryan thinks suddenly of Father Thomas, calling him, asking him for help. But he knows that seeking anyone else out, with this information, would mean the end of Shane. And, if he’s really, truly honest with himself, he doesn’t want that. 

“I’ll leave this body, if I have to.” 

Ryan’s heart pounds hard against his ribs. “What?”

“If you won’t let me out of here, I’ll leave this body and go. I can’t take it across the line but I myself can go out any other way.”

Shit. Ryan hadn’t considered that. Shane’s corporeal form is trapped in his kitchen but the… spirit or soul or whatever the fuck that the actual demon Shane is made out of isn’t confined to the physical form. It can dispel itself from the body and then leave that behind, lying on Ryan’s kitchen floor. 

Ryan’s skin crawls at the thought. It would be like Shane just collapsed and died in his kitchen, and that makes the sour twist in his stomach even worse. 

Shane watches him raptly as he has the biggest internal debate of his life. Ryan tosses his water bottle onto the couch and paces a few steps away, hands pulling through his hair before settling them on his hips. He tries to approach this logically but his brain has finally, officially melted out of his fucking ears and all he has left is the voice at the back of his head and the sharp ache in his chest.

It surprises him how he is both terrified and not at all afraid of Shane. Because Shane is right. If he had ever wanted to hurt him or drag his soul to hell or whatever the fuck it is that demons do, he could have done it an innumerable amount of times before now. He isn’t afraid of Shane because of what he’s done, but of what he is, and that’s… that’s not fair.

And maybe he’s rationalizing it to himself because they’ve been friends for so long, or because he makes Ryan weak in the fucking knees, and feel safer than he’s ever felt in his life. Or maybe Shane just has him in his thrall and Ryan only feels brave now because he’s being compelled to want to let Shane free.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

All of the _maybes_ are fucking exhausting and Ryan is suddenly so tired that he doesn’t care. He wants Shane to go but he doesn’t want it to be forever. He wants the chance to think about this when he isn’t nauseated and on the verge of a frankly embarrassing amount of tears.

With a deep breath, he summons more courage than he thinks he’s ever had in his life, and approaches the salt line. Shane straightens, shoulders pulling back, as Ryan comes close. Their eyes meet. Shane looks so fucking _sad_ that Ryan almost can’t stand it.

“Back up,” he says quietly.

Shane retreats several steps until the small of his back hits the opposing counter. Ryan fists his shaking hands and draws his foot through the salt. Shane doesn’t move as Ryan backs up to the front door, unlocks it and pulls it open. Their eyes meet again and Shane pushes himself off from the counter.

Weariness beats out any lingering fear as Shane draws up close. He pauses, when they’re close enough to touch, and sticks his feet into his shoes. Shane looks at him when he’s done.

Ryan swallows around the ache in the back of his throat. “Don’t—don’t go away for good.” When he hears the relieved exhale Shane lets out, he closes his eyes and presses his forehead to the side of the door; his sweaty palm shakes around the doorknob. 

“Okay,” Shane says, when Ryan doesn’t say anything else. He steps out the door, but pauses before Ryan shuts it. “Thank you.”

“Just go,” Ryan tells him, shaking his head against the edge of the door. “Please.”

When Ryan has shut and locked himself up inside his bedroom, he doesn’t feel anything but numb. And when he sleeps, he dreams of Iowa over and over again.

 

\--

 

Ryan uses way too many of his sick days, unable to bring himself to leave his apartment, let alone go to work. Shane makes no attempts to contact him, apparently willing to wait Ryan out, give him whatever space he needs, but Ryan can’t _think_. Every time he tries to sit down and parse the situation, everything that he’s learned and everything that has passed between him and Shane, he continues to draw up short at the first time that Shane kissed him.

He feels fucking stupid for not having seen it sooner or suspected anything. He’d always just thought Shane was a fucking weirdo, but he never once really thought that there could be more to it than that. 

Still, Shane is right. He’s had chance after chance to hurt Ryan and he never did. He never even tried. 

And then there’s the memory of that kiss again, of Shane gathering him close at night, and the constant familiar touch of fingers threading through his own. And Ryan is stuck there. 

He’s well and truly stuck and he doesn’t know how to get unstuck.

On Friday morning, he texts Shane.

_Meet me_

The tremor in his hands causes him to hit send too early. “Fuck,” he whispers, trying to finish the thought quickly.

 _Where?_ Shane responds before he can.

_Santa Monica Pier._

The ellipsis appears on Shane’s side of the conversation for only a moment. _Right now?_

In theory, Shane should be at work, but Ryan has absolutely no idea if he’s been going in or not. Ryan had told him not to disappear forever, but he doesn’t know what he’s done beyond that.

 _Noon_.

_Okay._

Ryan locks his phone and tosses it to the bed beside him. He sucks in a breath, folding his hands and pressing his forehead to them. He feels like he should be doing something, praying or calling Father Thomas, or finding a church where he can get some holy water. Anything. 

Even the thought feels like blasphemy. 

He just gets up and starts getting himself ready.

 

\--

 

Ryan sits in the sand, his toes buried, forearms on his knees, staring out at the water. He forgot his sunglasses in his car but he really doesn’t have the energy to get up and go back to get them. So he squints against the cloudy sunlight and waits.

His phone sits in his front pocket but it never buzzes. And eventually Shane appears at his left, dropping down to sit beside him in his dark skinny jeans and a fucking white button-up with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Ryan turns to look at him, resting his cheek on his bicep. Shane has an iced coffee in each hand and he holds one out to bump against Ryan’s wrist. He takes it without hesitation.

“Thanks.”

Shane nods and looks out at the lazy roll of waves against the shoreline, several feet away. His sunglasses sit up on top of his carefully messy hair but he doesn’t pull them down. 

“Everyone keeps asking about you,” he says to the water.

Ryan sets his coffee down and folds his arms to rest his chin on them. He’s so fucking tired.

“You’re still working,” Ryan says; it’s not a question.

“I don’t plan on leaving unless you tell me to.”

Ryan closes his eyes. That’s too much fucking power over a situation that he feels so incredibly lost in. 

He has a list of questions for Shane that he’s spent days compiling, hastily scrawled out in his Unsolved notebook, half typed out into the notes on his phone, and pounding against the sides of his brain. He doesn’t know where to start.

“I don’t know how old I am,” Shane says, biting at his straw but not actually drinking from it. Ryan looks at him, the sharp cut of his stubbled jaw, the curve of his nose. He closes his eyes again and takes a deep breath, feeling it burn in his lungs.

“Were you ever human?”

Shane shakes his head. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember ever having a body of my own.”

Ryan ruffles his own hair, letting his foot push out further into the sand so that he can rest his elbow on his thigh, his cheek in his palm. Shane looks at him then. Ryan tries to assess how he feels but all he can determine is that he doesn’t feel any fear. And that’s good enough, for the moment. 

He wants to forgive Shane’s deception. He knows that. He figures the fact that he’s sitting here right now tells Shane that fact as well. Now Shane just has to earn it.

“I wanted to be, though.”

“That doesn’t really fit my idea of what a demon is.”

Shane shrugs and looks back at the water, then his coffee—mostly ice now—and back at Ryan. “I don’t know what to tell you. I mean, I’ve done my share of demon shit.”

“Demon shit,” Ryan says on the tail end of a huff of laughter. He rubs his eyes with one hand. “What is ‘demon shit’, exactly?”

“Crossroad deals, mostly. You remember that thing when people danced themselves to death in 1518?”

Ryan really does laugh, then. “Please don’t tell me that was you. Is that why you’re so obsessed with that?”

Shane isn’t laughing but he is grinning and Ryan feels an almost sickening rush of warmth for him in his stomach. He shifts in the sand and picks up his coffee for lack of anything else to do with his hands. 

“It wasn’t me that caused it but I certainly enjoyed watching it.”

Ryan shouldn’t find that funny but he wheezes out a laugh anyway. Shane’s smile turns soft and Ryan burns inside. 

“You’re a sick fuck, you know that?” 

Shane shrugs. “Part of the deal.”

“Fuck,” Ryan says. “You’re fuckin’ old, then.”

Shane nods again. “I don’t remember all of it. There’s a shit-ton I don’t remember. I go dormant sometimes. Like I don’t exist at all for decades at a time. It’s hard to explain.”

“You just, what? Find somewhere and go to ground?”

“I guess.”

“You’re just a wealth of information.”

“And you are surprisingly ballsy, right now.” While Ryan stares at him, Shane taps his cup against Ryan’s and takes a sip, like it’s in his honor.

“Dick.” 

Shane laughs and goes on watching him. It’s fucking intense to hold Shane’s gaze right now and Ryan doesn’t fault himself for looking away. The breeze that rushes in off the water is on the side of too cool but Shane is hot like a fucking fire burning beside him so it kind of evens out.

“Why are you here now?” he asks. “Not like _here_ , but like… BuzzFeed?”

“It just seemed like the thing to do. Get a job. I’ve been _this_ ,” he gestures to himself, “longer than I’ve ever been anyone else. I didn’t have a plan.” He looks at Ryan. “And then you happened. And Unsolved, fuck. It was perfect.”

“What was?”

“I don’t need to eat anything, but your fear was like all-you-can-eat buffet.”

Ryan sputters. “Fucking _what_? You fed off my _fear_?” 

Shane waves him off. “You make it sound weird.”

“It _is_ fuckin’ weird!” 

“You got brave, though,” Shane says, like Ryan isn’t gaping at him right now. “You’re not quite so delicious anymore.”

Ryan shoves him and Shane laughs, catching himself on his other elbow in the sand. His stupid, squinty-eyed smile cracks open the hardened resentment in his belly. He’s struck suddenly with the realization that this is going to be okay. He’s going to find a way to make this okay.

“Creep,” Ryan mutters as Shane rights himself again. “Wearing boots to the beach. That shows people you’re a fuckin’ weirdo even before they know you sustain yourself on people’s fear.”

“Your fear,” Shane corrects him, leaning over his ridiculously long legs to start unlacing his boots. 

Ryan watches him toss his boots aside and tug off his socks. The delicate bones in the tops of his feet are quickly buried in the sand beside Ryan’s.

“So,” he says when Shane has settled again beside him, linking his fingers between his knees. 

Shane looks at him. When Ryan doesn’t continue he says, “Whatever you want to know.”

Ryan nods, more to himself than to Shane, pulling his chapped bottom lip into his mouth as he thinks.

“You… you went through the windshield, back in Iowa.” 

Shane nods. “It took a minute for me to shake it off, before I could get to you.”

Ryan can only remember flashes of the accident. Being pulled from the wreck and Shane cradling him in the freezing cold. “Did you… I don’t know. Heal me, or something? I feel like I should have had more of a head injury than I did.”

“It’s not my strong suit, but I did what I could. It was the head or the arm, so I went with the head.”

Ryan reflexively touches his cast; he doesn’t know what to follow that up with, so he asks, “Are ghosts real?”

Shane expels a long breath. “Yes.” Ryan closes his eyes. “Not a word to the Shaniacs. They’ll be crushed.”

“Aliens?”

“Probably.”

“Bigfoot?”

“Maybe?”

“Chupacabra?” 

“What the f—I don’t fucking know, Ryan; I’m not omniscient.”

“But aliens are _probably_ real?”

Shane sighs heavily and gives him the same look he does when Ryan presents him with a theory that he clearly thinks is bullshit. It takes a lot for Ryan to not laugh at him. 

“That’s logic, Ry. The universe is bigger than this planet and this galaxy. It’s way bigger than me or you.”

“Yeah, I guess.” 

Silence falls between them again and this time Ryan doesn’t feel uncomfortable or uneasy. He doesn’t want to get up and leave Shane behind anymore than he wants Shane to disappear from his life. There are years of history between them and Ryan doesn’t want to lose it.

“You said that you hadn’t ever let anything hurt me.” Shane nods. “Has anything tried?”

Considering his words, Shane opens and then closes his mouth, then finally says, “I’ve always been sufficiently intimidating to keep anything from trying.”

“You’re not slick enough to pull that past me,” Ryan says, pointing at hm. “Nothing tried but something _wanted_ to?” Before Shane can answer, Ryan shifts closer. “Was it the Sallie House demon?”

Shane tosses his head back and looks skyward before shaking his head at Ryan. “That wasn’t a demon. You were shitting yourself over practically nothing.”

“But there _was_ something.”

“Oh my god.”

“Can you even say that?” Ryan presses.

“I just did.”

Ryan sits cross-legged now, more turned toward Shane than he is the ocean. He has a million questions that he wants to ask, but Shane speaks before he can continue with his interrogation. 

“How did you figure it out?” he asks. “Don’t tell me those Instagram comments finally sowed the seeds of doubt.”

Ryan shakes his head. “At the Goldfield Hotel, when you were in the room that the woman was chained up in—“ 

“Ahh,” Shane says, like he knows without Ryan finishing what he’s going to say.

He does anyway, gesturing to his face. “Your eyes.”

Shane nods. Then he lets out a noise of acceptance, like Ryan had just told him something completely obvious. The sky is blue, water is wet, I realized you were a demon because I caught your all-black eyes on camera in a haunted hotel. Everyday things.

“We’ve known each other a long time and you’ve never… slipped up, or whatever, before. Why did it happen there?”

Shane’s long legs fold down; he starts dragging his index finger through the sand, making up aimless lines as he goes. Eventually he blows out a breath that flutters the hair hanging over his forehead. 

“You know when we talk about serial killers, and we wonder why they taunt the police and dangle evidence in front of them, and show up to the funerals of victims?” Ryan nods and Shane looks at him. “Maybe I wanted to be caught.”

“You either did or you didn’t.”

Shane shakes his head minutely. “I have wanted to tell you. There was never a good time. I could never be sure how you’d react.”

“But you let me figure it out.”

“Turned out okay,” Shane says. 

Ryan goes quiet, thinking. He’s still bursting at the seams with questions but he doesn’t know what to ask and what to let Shane tell him of his own volition. Between them, Shane’s hand presses down, his fingers disappearing beneath the sand. Ryan watches it sink in, the skin under his cast itching where he can’t scratch.

He sighs a breath out his nose. “What’s with the eyes? What—why were they like that?”

“It’s my true sight. I don’t see other—I don’t see into the veil constantly. I can sense other things around me but I don’t see them unless I’m specifically looking.”

“Ahh,” Ryan says because he can’t think of a single thing to follow that up with.

“I feel out every location, before we start investigating. And if I sense anything I need to warn off, then I do.”

Ryan hesitates, rubbing his clammy palms against his thighs. “What—why do you have to warn things away from us?”

“Away from _you_. It’s not usually the nice things that respond when you call them a motherfucker.”

An unfortunate snort of laughter escapes Ryan. It helps tramp down on the fear that that statement instills in him, because holy shit, he has been courting danger pretty readily and he had no fucking idea that all that stood between him and the things crawling around in the dark was Shane.

And Shane has stood readily between him and the unknown every time, because he wanted to. 

“I guess I just don’t get why you’ve stuck around so long. What do you get out of any of this?” Ryan asks, gesturing around vaguely. 

“I told you. I love you.”

Ryan pinches his eyes shut and rubs at one as he reaches blindly for Shane’s hand, still buried in the sand. 

“You are one crazy asshole, you know that?”

“Crazy for you, baby,” Shane says in one of the obnoxious voices usually reserved for the imitation of people in the stories Ryan tells on Unsolved. 

Ryan’s heart is beating too hard and too loud, but the feeling of Shane’s fingers, gritty with sand, woven through his own, squeezing just this side of too-hard, settles it. Settles him.

“Fuck, what am I doing?” Ryan mutters, rubbing at his face again. “This is fucking insane. You’re a demon. And I’m the biggest fuckin’ baby on the planet.”

“You’re plenty brave. And when you’re not, I’ve got your back.”

The lump forming in Ryan’s throat makes it hard to swallow, when he looks at Shane. The wind is picking up a little, the smell of saltwater strong, and the shouts and laughter from the Pier drift over, louder now. Ryan unsuccessfully tries to focus on anything but the way that Shane’s hand fits around his, with his long, bony-ass fingers.

His world is narrowed down to that singular point. He looks out at the water again and holds on tightly to Shane.

**Author's Note:**

> I love and appreciate comments and kudos so much. Let me know what you think ❤

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] I'm clean out of air in my lungs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15517416) by [Shmaylor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shmaylor/pseuds/Shmaylor)




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